MultiInstruct: Improving Multi-Modal Zero-Shot Learning via Instruction Tuning

Instruction tuning, a new learning paradigm that fine-tunes pre-trained language models on tasks specified through instructions, has shown promising zero-shot performance on various natural language processing tasks. However, it has yet to be explored for vision and multimodal tasks. In this work, we introduce MUL-TIINSTRUCT, the first multimodal instruction tuning benchmark dataset that consists of 62 diverse multimodal tasks in a unified seq-toseq format covering 10 broad categories. The tasks are derived from 21 existing open-source datasets and each task is equipped with 5 expertwritten instructions. We take OFA (Wang et al., 2022a) as the base pre-trained model for multimodal instruction tuning, and to further improve its zero-shot performance, we explore multiple transfer learning strategies to leverage the large-scale NATURAL INSTRUCTIONS dataset (Mishra et al., 2022) . Experimental results demonstrate strong zero-shot performance on various unseen multimodal tasks and the benefit of transfer learning from a text-only instruction dataset. We also design a new evaluation metric -Sensitivity, to evaluate how sensitive the model is to the variety of instructions. Our results indicate that fine-tuning the model on a diverse set of tasks and instructions leads to a reduced sensitivity to variations in instructions for each task 1 .